Thomas Adès: Dante

Nonesuch Records’ recording of Thomas Adès’s Dante documents the world premiere recording of a large-scale new orchestral ballet score, taped live at Walt Disney Concert Hall in April 2022 with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. It won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance and was also nominated for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, a rare instance of a substantial newly composed work competing directly against, and beating, recordings of established repertoire in the Grammys’ main orchestral category.

Dante is built in three acts that follow the structure of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy directly: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. It was co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and The Royal Ballet, with the staged ballet premiering at the Royal Opera House in London in 2021, deliberately timed to the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, before this concert account with Adès’s own orchestra-of-origin followed the next year. Structuring an hour-plus orchestral score around one of the most famous long poems in Western literature is an unusually direct piece of programme music for a contemporary composer to attempt, and the three-act shape gives Adès a natural excuse to move between the score’s most extreme registers: the Inferno movement in particular leans on a huge percussion section and deliberately abrasive orchestral colour, a long way from the more consonant, luminous writing that closes the work in Paradiso.

About Thomas Adès

Adès is among the most consistently commissioned and performed composers of his generation, with a back catalogue spanning opera (The Tempest, The Exterminating Angel), orchestral works, and chamber music, alongside an active career as a conductor and pianist. Dante sits within a body of work that returns repeatedly to literary and dramatic sources reimagined for the concert hall or opera house rather than as incidental scores, and its scale, a full-length, three-part ballet for large orchestra and chorus, makes it one of the more ambitious single commissions of Adès’s career to date.

About the performance

Gustavo Dudamel has led the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009, and the orchestra’s relationship with Adès, including earlier residencies and premieres, makes this a genuinely close reading of a new score by a familiar collaborator rather than a one-off guest engagement. Recording the piece live during actual concert performances, rather than in a separate studio session, is also a meaningful choice for music this rhythmically and texturally demanding: it captures the orchestra playing the piece under real performance conditions rather than in the more forgiving, stop-and-fix environment of a studio date.

About the score’s structure

Each of the three acts draws on a different orchestral vocabulary to match its place in Dante’s journey. Inferno moves through a sequence of short, vividly characterised movements named directly after episodes in the poem, “The Gluttons,” “The Thieves,” “Satan, In the Lake of Ice”, each built around a distinct orchestral texture rather than a single continuous symphonic argument, closer in spirit to a suite of tone-poems than to a conventional ballet score’s usual pacing. Purgatorio shifts toward longer, more continuous movements as the drama’s tone lightens, and Paradiso closes the work with a single extended movement charting an ascent through the poem’s celestial spheres, moon, the visible planets, the fixed stars, and finally the Empyrean, ending in music considerably more consonant and settled than anything that came before it. That arc, from fragmented infernal violence to a single sustained ascent, mirrors the poem’s own structure closely enough that the music can be followed as a fairly literal programme, rather than a free abstraction from its literary source.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic, covering a real recording released long after the original shop closed in 2018. It isn’t part of the site’s recovered archive, it’s new coverage, extending the same kind of critical attention the original site gave to notable classical releases in its own time to what’s actually being recorded, performed, and awarded today.